Latest controversy may cost NAPLAN its final few supporters

NAPLAN has few friends these days. Many in the education sector have joined the argument against it, warning its data is being mis-used, its importance is over-emphasised and the industry it spawned is exploiting families.

Only a few supporters remain. They include parents hungry for information on how their children are faring compared with their peers and researchers that use the data generated by the tests to study trends in students' performance.

NAPLAN has very few supporters left. Credit:Dominic Lorrimer

But as a result of the move towards online testing, NAPLAN may have lost both.

Their uncertainty alone is enough to undermine any comparison of this year's results in the minds of some parents, teachers and academics. "The 2018 data is worthless," said NSW Teachers Federation president Maurie Mulheron.

Differences in data could invalidate comparison with past years, when all tests were written. And it would mean that a single student's performance in an online test this year could not be compared with their performance in a previous written test, or across the entire cohort of students.

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And if parental faith is shaken, it could affect the wider NAPLAN-driven businesses – the private schools that market their results to attract students, or the real estate agents that use the local school's performance as a way to talk up house prices.

The online version of NAPLAN, which was being rolled out in 2018 and 2019 ahead of full implementation in 2020, is a so-called 'formative test'. It adapts to suit a child's ability; if they get the first answers correct, the questions become harder.

It is also considered a much more accurate reflection of a student's ability than the written test.

They were reassured by the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority, which is responsible for NAPLAN, that a scaling system would be used to equate the results of the different tests.

It's true that tests are often equated, said leading psychometrician, Professor James Tognolini. But there is always a margin of error. But problems occur if there is so much scrutiny on tests results that the tiniest changes are given significance.

Equating also doesn't take into account the "motivational, engagement factors" that could influence results, he said. Perhaps, for example, the cohort of children taking the online test were more engaged than those doing the older written test.

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"[NAPLAN] was never set out to be a high stakes test where people were worried about minute differences," Professor Tognolini said.

Peter Goss, the School Education Program Director at the Grattan Institute, uses NAPLAN data in his analyses. He believes transferring NAPLAN to an online platform is a positive move that will make the data more valuable.

But he is concerned about any break in the data, which would make it harder to see which states and schools were improving or otherwise. "We now have 10 years of NAPLAN data, which lets us do really good longitudinal analysis," he said.

"No one wants a situation where results from before and after the move to online testing have to be analysed separately."